Crate Music Library

Dig the crate

Playlists are for songs. Crates are for albums.

Crate has both. All your playlists are here, and Crate makes new ones too: Mixtapes that refill themselves from rules, or the Clerk, who builds one from a few words. A crate is something else. It's twelve of your own albums, joined by a thread you can see: the same label, the same hometown, one word in every title, albums turning thirty this year, the ones almost nobody else is playing. New crates turn up every day, and you can make your own.

Start digging and each album comes out to face you, with why it's in the crate and thirty seconds of it playing. Keep it or put it back. Or just listen: flip through one song from each album, hear three from each and then the next three, or play them whole.

Crates on iPad: Night in the Title at the top of the pile, every album with Night in its title fanned under a hand-lettered divider card, with more crates below

Digging through a crate on iPhone: Sonny Rollins' A Night at the Village Vanguard pulled out, with why it's in the crate, thirty seconds playing, and Keep or Put It Back

Ask in your own words

Say what you want to hear.

Type it the way you'd say it to a friend who knows your music. Apple Intelligence reads it, and the Clerk builds the list from songs you already have, never from a stranger's chart.

Moods, decades, tempo, key, length, "like Tom Waits but not Tom Waits", songs you haven't played since 2012
Swap, Keep or Remove any song, or ask "Why?" and it tells you
Save any list as a mixtape, or have it pick fresh every week

The Clerk on iPhone reading a request into the parts 80s, sad and songs under five minutes

The Clerk's list on iPhone, each song with its mood and year, and Why, Swap, Keep and Remove

Real requests, really pulled

Tap a slip. Each one was typed into the Clerk and run on a real Apple Music library, using Apple Intelligence on the device: what it understood, the songs it pulled, and what it said when part of a request was beyond it.

Crate · pulled for you25 songs

“Motown for a road trip, nothing slow”

energeticmotown

ABC1992Jackson 5
War1970Edwin Starr
Higher Ground1973Stevie Wonder
First I Look at the Purse (Single Version)1992The Contours
I Can't Get Next to You1992The Temptations
What's Going On (Single Version / Mono)1992Marvin Gaye

+ 19 more on the list

New releases, every Friday

A box of new albums, picked through yours.

Every Friday a box arrives with the week's new releases that connect to albums you already own: their label, a musician or producer on them, an artist they sound like, the town they come from. Never just more from artists you have. Each album says why it's in the box.

Hear thirty seconds of every track, then sort the delivery: Add to Library, Later, or Not for Me. Coming Soon is a wall calendar of the albums your artists have announced.

The Friday Box on iPad: this week's new albums standing in an open box, the front one lifted out, with why it's in the box and a listening post

Musical Road Trips

Travel through your own albums.

Pick where to start and where to end. Crate plans the road through albums you already own and plays it, and every stop says why it follows the last.

Ride the Years: songs from every year you own an album from, in all your music or one genre, with a sign at each new decade
Genre Road Map: Delta Blues to House by way of Chicago blues, R&B and funk
Two Albums, One Road: from one album to another through the producer, player or studio they share
The Tour Bus: town to town on a map, by where your artists come from

Another Version takes a different road with different songs, as often as you like, and the Road Trip widget carries on from where you stopped.

The Tour Bus on iPhone: Athens to Seattle on a map, stopping in towns along the way, with the albums from each

Ride the Years on iPhone: 1960 to 1969, two songs a year, with how many of your albums are from each year and their covers

Pop-Up Facts

The story behind the song, while it plays.

Like the music videos you grew up on: every half minute a bubble pops up over Now Playing with how the song was written, who played on it, what happened in the studio. Each one says where it came from, and a tap opens it there.

On the Tour Bus, every town you reach sends a postcard with its picture, and they pile up on the trip to flip through.

A postcard from Memphis on the Tour Bus, over Now Playing

Smart playlists, on tape

Mixtapes that keep themselves up to date.

Set the rules once, like "added in the last month" or "the '90s and not played lately", and the tape changes as your library does. Describe one in a sentence and Apple Intelligence writes the rules for you to check.

Playlists sit beside them, as burned discs: any songs, in your order, made by hand. Your Music app playlists play here too, in boxes of your own.

Every tape gets a painted cover and a label in your hand. Pick how long the tape is, from 46 minutes to two hours, and it splits into Side A and Side B, with a printed insert of liner notes. Crate can also copy it into the Music app as an ordinary playlist, so it follows you to every Apple device and the car.

The Mixtapes room on iPad: a painted bedroom with a tape deck and cassettes on the shelf, above your mixtapes and playlists

Mixtapes and playlists on iPhone: Recently Added and Forgotten Favorites on tape, Road Songs on a burned disc, and The '90s

The story behind the album

Liner notes for every album, and room for your own.

Open any album's liner notes: the story of how it was made, who played on it and where it was recorded, and a side all about you and this album, from your first play to your favourite song on it.

Then write on the sleeve. A note of your own, in your own words: where you first heard it, which side to start with, who it reminds you of. It shows on the album everywhere, travels to your other devices through iCloud, and mixtapes can pick songs by what you wrote.

Liner notes for Pet Sounds on iPhone: the album, your handwritten note, and sides for the story, credits, and you and this album

Side A of the liner notes: the story of Pet Sounds, from Wikipedia

Pet Sounds on iPhone with a note written on the sleeve: Headphones, lights off, side two first

Right where you stopped

Pick up where you left off, to the second.

Crate keeps your five most recent albums or playlists, each saved at the song and the second you stopped. Tap one and it plays on from exactly there.

5most recent albums or playlists

Songthe one you were on

Secondwhere you stopped in it

They follow you: stop an album on your iPhone and it's waiting in your iPad's sidebar, and on CarPlay when you get in the car.

Crate on iPad with Pick Up in the sidebar: the same five albums

Pick Up Where You Left Off on iPhone: While You Weren't Looking, next up song 2; Wild Honey, 0:04 into song 1

Made for iPhone Duo

One album, every way you hold it.

Crate follows the room it's given, not the name of the device. Fold or unfold at any moment and you're still on the same page, with the same album playing.

Crate on the closed iPhone Duo: Home at full height, with Up Next, Pick Up and Album of the Day — **Closed**The outer screen keeps your music at full height, with the controls in the side strip.

Half-folded, like a bookThe album on one page, its liner notes on the other, meeting at the crease.

Crate on the open iPhone Duo: the sidebar beside a shelf of albums — **Open**A two-column app: your shelves beside the sidebar, the way they are on iPad.

Turned upright

Half-folded, set downLay the bottom half on the table: the album plays above the fold, and its liner notes and story sit on the half below.

Crate on the open iPhone Duo held upright: a grid of album covers — **Open, held upright**A page of covers the size of a paperback, three across.

Every album, sorted properly

The whole discography, and what's missing from yours.

Open an artist and their albums are laid out the way a collector thinks: Albums, Live, Compilations, Soundtracks, Singles & EPs. The ones you have wear a ribbon. The rest are one tap from your library.

"You have 30 of their 54 studio albums." Crate checks MusicBrainz so a live album isn't filed as a studio one, and a soundtrack with one of their songs on it isn't counted as theirs.

The Genesis artist page on iPad with rows of Albums and Live albums, some marked In Your Library and others with an Add button

The Neil Young artist page on iPhone: You have 30 of their 54 studio albums

On your home screen

Drop the needle without opening the app.

Put today's album, a crate, the music that suits right now, or one of your mixtapes on your home screen. Each one has a Play button that works right there: tap it and the music starts, and Crate stays out of the way.

7widgets, small to large

Playstraight from the home screen

Lookthe buttons wear your Look's colour

The Mixtape widget is a cassette in the tape's own colour; hold it to choose which tape. Pick Up, Now Playing and the Road Trip you’re on are there too.

Crate's widgets on an iPhone home screen: Album of the Day (Miles Davis at Fillmore) with Drop the Needle, Top of the Pile (Night in the Title) with Play a Mix, the Recently Added mixtape as a cassette with Play, and Right Now (Monday Morning)

Seven record shops to wander

Flip through the rack and see where it takes you.

Wander stands artists in the bin of a record shop. Pull one out to hear it, keep it for a crate, or wander on to the next. Any artist works, whether you own them or not.

Every look has a shop of its own, and Follow the Music puts a record in the shop that would stock it: a jazz record in the jazz club. Flip through all seven like records in a crate: tap a tab or the front card, swipe, or use the arrow keys.

iPad, landscape

1 of 7

Record ShopA sunlit neighbourhood shop

Albums you don't have yet

A listening room for what you're missing.

Take an album off the ledge and put it on the stand: its score, when it was reviewed, and a button to hear thirty seconds. Browse by this week's reviews, by new releases from artists in your library, by more from the ones you love, or by the people who played on them.

For albums by artists you don't have yet, picked through the ones you do, there's the Friday Box.

Your library, counted

Eighteen ways to see your library.

Stats is a wall of eighteen sleeves, each drawn from your own albums: the hours you listen as a clock, your year as a ring, your artists' hometowns as lights on a map, the label you own most on a record, the words your songs sing most, your seasons, your milestones, the albums almost nobody else plays. Choose anything from Last Week to All Time to change what's counted. Tap a town, a label or a word and Crate plans a road trip through it. And every section dresses for your look, from a record-shop divider card to late-night neon.

Open History for every play, year by year, down to the song: a year, then a month, then a day, and each song you played and when.

18sections

10,858albums

141,085songs

A real library, as the screenshots show it. Crate starts from Apple Music's own play counts, keeps every play it sees as it goes, and Last.fm can fill in everything before.

Stats on iPad: all eighteen sleeves, from a crate of albums for Overview and a waveform of song lengths down to the people on your albums, a mood map, the seasons, your next milestone and the albums you kept from crates

Every Play on iPhone: 2026, then September, then Monday the 21st with each song and the time it was played

Seven looks, light and dark

Dress it like your favourite corner of music.

Each look has its own colours and its own typeface, checked for contrast in light and dark. Or let Crate change look every day.

Home from top to bottom (Pick Up, Album of the Day, the Friday Box, Right Now, Crates, the Back Room and more), changing look as it goes.

Record Shop look — **Record Shop**Cream paper, raspberry and mustard

Jazz Club look in dark mode — **Jazz Club**Navy and brass, like an old sleeve

Punk Zine look — **Punk Zine**Photocopy black with a hot-pink tear

Soul Revue look — **Soul Revue**Warm '70s orange, brown and gold

Late Night look in dark mode — **Late Night**Purple and teal, FM after midnight

Industrial look in dark mode — **Industrial**Concrete, steel and hazard yellow

New Age look — **New Age**Sage, sand and still water

Built around what you own

Your library, not a feed.

Apple Music

Your whole library

Every album, song and playlist in your Apple Music library, including songs you added yourself. Playing from Apple Music's catalogue needs a subscription.

Apple Intelligence

Reads you, privately

Requests are read on your device, or on Apple's Private Cloud Compute for the harder ones. No account, no server of ours.

iPhone · iPad · Watch · CarPlay · Siri

Wherever you listen

Your crates, pins and mixtapes follow you through iCloud. Your Apple Watch is a remote for the phone, with what's playing on your watch face. Say "Ask the Clerk" to Siri from anywhere.

And everything else

Plenty more reasons to dig.

Every morning

Album of the Day

One album from your own shelves, and why it's today's: it came out on this date, you saved it on this date years ago, or you never got round to it.

Yours to keep

Make Your Own Crate

Pick twelve albums by hand, or describe a crate in a few words and Apple Intelligence fills it from your library. It stays until you delete it.

For this hour

Right Now

Music for the moment you're in. Crate reads the time, the season and what you usually play at this hour and, if you let it, the weather.

What the critics said

Reviews

Every score an album got, from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork, plus Metacritic's average. Tap one to read the whole review right in Crate.

An artist, in order

Discography Journeys

Hear an artist's albums in the order they came out, one album at a time. Crate keeps your place, even weeks later.

A few songs to go

Almost Finished

Albums you've nearly heard all the way through. One tap plays just the songs you missed.

Every song, heard

Back in the Sleeve

Crate notices when you've heard every song on an album, in one sitting or bit by bit over months, even on shuffle, and slips it back in the sleeve to wait for your stars and a few words of your own.

A turntable you can play

Drop the Needle

The needle crosses the record as the song plays. Drag the deck to jump around the song, with a tick for every groove.

Handwritten

Staff Picks

Albums from your own shelves, each with a handwritten note on why it's worth a spin. New every week.

New to you

Nobody You Know Yet

Artists loved by people who play what you play, and you don't own a thing by. Tap one to hear thirty seconds.

Tidy shelves

Library Health

Albums saved twice, ones Apple Music won't play, missing covers: Crate finds them and puts the fix right beside each one.

In the car

CarPlay

Carry on any of your last five albums from the second you left it, with your mixtapes and whole library a tap away.

What’s coming

Up Next

See what plays after this song, drag it into a new order, or take a song out. Play Next or Play Later works on any song, or a whole album.

Last thing at night

Sleep Timer

The music stops in fifteen minutes, an hour or two, or at the end of this song or this album. Nothing cut off mid-chorus.

Not that one

Hide an Album

The karaoke disc, the kids’ songs, the second copy: hide it and it stays off every shelf and crate. Settings brings it back whenever you like.

One swipe away

Control Center

Album of the Day and Today’s Crate as buttons in Control Center and on your Lock Screen. Press one and the music starts.

From anywhere

In Your Search

Your albums, artists and playlists turn up when you search your iPhone or iPad. Pick one and Crate opens right on it.

A tape like this song

Mixtape Like This

Playing something you love? One tap and the Clerk lists your own songs that sound like it, ready to keep as a mixtape.

Hands on the keys

Keyboard on iPad

With a keyboard, Tab moves between the sidebar and the page, the arrows walk every shelf, and Return opens or plays.

Every play, kept

ListenBrainz

Send what you play to ListenBrainz as well as Last.fm, even songs played in the Music app while Crate was closed.

Your music is personal. Your app should be too.